Posted by Scott Yost:

When it came time for Chris's (see picture, different trip) beginner's cave trip in the fall of '95, word was out about the infamous 12 hour Sloan Valley marathon of the previous year (See Mychal's account.) Nevertheless, as always, a large group turned out for the trip to Lott Dean Cave on the Cumberland Plateu. It turned out to be a nice enough cave: plenty of big walking passages, not much crawling. Had Chris become a wimp? We suspected he had some surprises in store, but what?

There were some interesting places in the cave, including some nice formations and a hole in the floor that a several of us crawled into to explore - Chris said there was virgin cave down there, but we just looped around through the narrow smooth-walled tubes and came back to where we started. Another passage would have gone on down, but we didn't try it.

We were planning to take a different passage out of the cave than we came in. We headed back toward it, and got our first clue that something was up when Chris started putting his valuables in his hat. He said it was going to be a little bit wet, and jumped into the chest-deep icy cold cave water to check out the water levels ahead. He came back and had us all follow.

There must have been a couple hundred yards of chest-to-neck deep water passage. I was glad I had my wooly polypro on, but this was still a bit much. At one point the water was so close to the top of the cave, you had to turn your head sideways to keep your nose above water. Also, the water was deep enough that the shorter people had to do some swimming. Mark said he held one girl up from behind when she stepped off a rock and started going under. The big challenge for me was keeping my camera dry. I had it wrapped in a double layer of plastic bags and some cloths inside my pack, and held it above my shoulder. That worked pretty well, though Chris complained later that I didn't get any pictures of the water passage!

Anyway, the water passage led to the alternate entrance we were planning to go out, so we were soon enough back in the sun. One girl was shivering pretty bad, but we got some warm clothes on her and she recovered once we were out.

Caving Trip Reports